Thursday, 30 August 2012

Delights to Come.......

The apple tree is literally dripping with apples. I'm not sure what type they are, they taste like a mix between cookers and eaters. Lovely Hubby delights in picking them off the tree and chomping away while he is about various chores on our patch. Me, I find the faces they make me pull only signifies they are a little to tart for my liking at the moment.

They will be brilliant in crumbles and pies and cooked down to make jars of apple sauce to go on LH's pork chops. I have lots of plans for appley delights, but there are other delights to come too and I will have to satisfy myself with the few I can grab and squirrel away before LH snaffles the lot.

He has plans afoot to make use of his birthday present from me (so it my own fault I am to be soon without apples), I bought him a fruit press and he has visions of gallons of cider brewing away nicely ready to strip paint be drunk at Christmas (if we can wait that long).

It's good this self sufficiency lark - you just have to be quick if you have different ideas for a specific crop!!

Another photo with the old apple tree in the background, this one is to show you my canny deer proof fences, erected around most of the raised beds. Made by simply reusing the netting that used to cover the raised beds at our last Farm and the electric fencing posts we used to have around the pigs there, they fit together perfectly. They have proved impenetrable up to now, fingers crossed we will soon be actually eating some of our courgettes instead of feeding the Berkshire wildlife.

I'm off to continue my sorting marathon in the spare room, I keep getting distracted, I think I need blinkers, or for the power to go off so I have no internet and no lovely Blogs to travel around reading while I drink my coffee.

LH will need to leave the cider until at least March, or it will be not very nice. We leave ours until the apple blossom had finished next spring, as you get a secondary fermentation when the trees blossom again - strange, but true.

We love our cider - we make about 80 L of cider and around 50 bottles of pasturised juice every year ( but not this year as the apple harvest is a bit poor!)

I am trying to figure out what I'm going to do with the pears from my tree. Do you prune that tree? I think maybe if you cut it shorter (so that you could reach to the top on a ladder, but no higher), you *might* end up with sweeter fruit. I'm no expert. This is my first year with a fruit tree. We were told that the sweetest fruit grows on the wood that is less than two years old.

This is my Blog, just me writing about our day to day life on a hillside in North Wales. Along with our dogs, Suky and Mavis, our cat Ginger .... who secretly thinks he's one of the canine gang ... and a roving band of egg laying chickens that live cheek by jowl with the local wildlife.

We grow our own fruit and vegetables, selling surplus plants and edibles at the gate. We sell the eggs the chickens lay, we reuse, recycle and rethink ... and life ticks over at a pace that suits us.

It is simply the wild and wacky ramblings of a 50 something townie turned country girl called Sue, who lost her heart to a sailor and started a new life in the country .... over nine years ago. On a path that took us from Cumbria to Oxfordshire, to Berkshire and then we found our home at the bottom of a wet and windy Welsh hillside by a busy main road.

Pull up a chair, grab a coffee and relax into a world of dogs, cats, chickens, the occasional grass munching sheep ... and some pretty delicious vegan foods ... oh did I mention that I don't actually eat the eggs!!

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Disclaimer

Our New Life in the Country is my blog.

I use it to chart the day by day, week by week, year by year goings on in mine and Lovely Hubby's life. In it I also express my views and opinions, and say what I do andoccasionally how I do it. I am hoping that this will prove to be a useful reminder for myself of how we did things, as we continue in our learning process.

If you chose to follow my practices it is assumed that you will do so with care and consideration, and question where necessary any methods or techniques I use to your own satisfaction and match them to your own circumstances.

The pictures in each blog post are taken by me unless otherwise credited, and as such should not be borrowed and used elsewhere without my consent.